“And I will restore your judges as at the first, and your counselors as at the beginning. Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city…For you shall be ashamed of the oaks in which you delighted; and you shall blush for the gardens that you have chosen…” (Isaiah 1:26-31 NRSV).

The above prophetic statement, or rather indictment, by the prophet Isaiah virtually sets and encapsulates the pathos of what was to be the longest prophetic literature in the Old Testament. Israel’s departure from the Shema of God – “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5) was the onset of spiritual declension and the eventual breakdown both in their personal and national lives.

The loss of the centrality of the knowledge of God bred desires and passions that drove them further and further away from the Presence of God. They planted (“oaks in which you delighted”) and constructed (“gardens that you have chosen”) with no sense or understanding of the Lord’s heart and mind. The “oaks” will be their shame and they will blush (be embarrassed) over the “gardens.” In the loss of the knowledge of God, they took on the knowledge of their doing. They knew the works they were doing at the cost of not knowing what the Lord wanted to do. In their doing, they were becoming something apart from God’s desire and longing.

In their focus of the “oaks” and “gardens,” the city of righteousness, God’s righteousness built into His people, the locus of Israel’s redemption, was in tatters. They got their “oaks” and “gardens” but lost the City.

In the concentration of their doing, Israel forfeited what was to be her destiny – becoming what God was doing in and through them. This is the Righteousness that was to fill, shape, make, structure, arrange, design, and compact them into His City.

As it was in Israel’s great failure before such a seducing temptation, so is it the ominous crisis of the church of our time. The works in which we do, the activities we eagerly perform, and the ministry we passionately pursue have in them the subtle and forbidden power, unknowingly it may seem, that exerts a becoming in us that is unlike the Lord’s nature. We plant the “oaks” till they defines us, hold us, own us, and to the point that our “leaf withers.” The “gardens” we build advertise us, pigeonhole us, classify us, and brand us till we are “without water”. In the blind and deceived state of our sustained becoming, we can no longer participate in the creative adventure of truly becoming what the Lord is doing – becoming the City where God dwells.

11th Oct 2019

“…through the veil, that is to say, his flesh..” (Heb. 10:20 KJV)

With the state of things in the lives of God’s people, it seems plausible that as the end of the age draws to a close, two distinctive types of believers will perhaps emerge more and more on the scene. One is that which obviously stands before the veil in the long, unfulfilled, and unsettled life, and the other that has experientially entered and lived within the veil, partaking the glories of the Great High Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The issue of the veil has remained one of the most unwelcomed and least considered truth in the long history of the church. For God, the veil served as a symbol and its meaning was demonstrated in the finished work of His Son; the veil enigmatically confronts every believer who is hungering for a deeper and intimate relationship with the Person of Jesus Christ. Comprehended and made personal, the veil is ultimately the gateway to a true knowledge of the Father and the Son Jesus Christ.

For me, the clearest and most profitable understanding of the veil comes from the writing of G.W. North, an English minister of the last century. In The Priesthood and The Offerings, he writes,
The rending of the Veil, not the removal of it, was the point to which God had been moving throughout all history. The Jews gazed upon their rent veil without comprehension, not knowing what God had done; understandably they sewed it up again and continued their time-honored self-deception. But it ill becomes us, who profess to be enlightened by the Spirit to attempt to remove the veil which God purposely left hanging there, lest we practice self-deception of a worse order than they. We who now are invited to enter the Holiest place must know what God has done; the way in is still through the veil; God rent it so that we may enter in through it. We must see that if our blessed Melchizedek needed to go in that way, then a thousand times more is it necessary for us to enter thereby. Indeed the unmistakable statement is that He inaugurated or consecrated this new and living way especially for us. He went in as the first of a long line of sons of which He is the Leader, and a great house of priests over which He is Chief. In this He was not as Aaron, who went in and out of the Holiest only as the first of a longline of High Priests who should succeed him in office following his demise.

Jesus went in first as the High Priest of the original order of Melchizedek over which He presides, and to which He gave His name, and all the priests who shall enter in through Him shall be with Him in the Holiest of all. Neither He nor they enter as Aaron, who went in round and under the drapes of the veil which dropped into position again upon his entrance and exit; Jesus our Melchizedek went in simultaneously with the rending of the veil which represented His own crucified flesh.(32)¹

North continues with this understanding by quoting a hymn. He writes:
Long ago Bishop Ray Palmer wrote a lovely hymn revealing his rare spiritual insight. With great perception in his opening lines he says, “Jesus, these eyes have never seen that radiant form of Thine, the veil of sense hangs dark between Thy blessed face and mine.” He realized that although the veil of the Tabernacle is rent, there is still a veil, even as did the writer to the Hebrews when he penned such words as “which hope we have as an anchor of the soul…which entereth into that within the veil whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an High Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” So the bishop goes further, finishing his poem with these words, “When death these mortal eyes shall seal, and still this throbbing heart, the rending veil shall Thee reveal, all glorious as Thou art.” (35)

The veil of sense that he speaks of is the mortal flesh or the physical body that houses our being; by our five outward senses and our basic fleshly urges, we cannot know God. When a person goes to Calvary to submit himself to the death of the cross, passing into God by Jesus’ death, he only does so as a result of the veil being taken off his mind because with his whole heart, he turned to God; but even so, while remaining here, he still abides in a tabernacle or earthly house. In the senses and powers of his outward man, he still does not see the Lord, although inwardly by reason of his inward senses and powers, he knows Him who is dwelling within. Through a spiritual experience of the death and resurrection of His Lord, he has entered through the rent veil of Jesus’ perfect flesh into the Holy places made without hands in the heavens. His soul is anchored in that which is within the veil, but physically he still dwells in his earthly tabernacle. This house, now entirely without the veil, serves him while he is awaiting the consummation; for in this respect, Jesus is the perfect example of the true life of every man who is a priest of His order.

May this ‘veil of sense’ linger only for so long as we approach the throne of grace and do so continuously, confidently, and boldly in the knowledge that our Great High Priest through His Spirit bear us to Himself as priest unto God.

¹North, G.W. A Sign of Authority and the Priesthood and the Offerings. Exeter: Publications Secretary, 1979. Print.

George MacDonald, a nineteenth-century Scottish writer, pastor, and novelist was a spiritual mentor to C.S. Lewis. His 366 sonnets, hand-written and later published as Diary of An Old Soul has been my devotional companion for many years. The richness of meaning and spiritual depth of these sonnets have light penetrating into every corner of the human heart. One of the sonnets that has settled deeply within me and resonates over and over again is as follows:

There is a coward sparing in the heart,
Offspring of penury and low-born fear-
Prayer must take heed nor overdo its part,
Asking too much of him with open ear!
Sinner must wait, not seek the very best,
Cry out for peace, and be of middling cheer-
False heart, thou cheatest God, and dost thy life molest. (91)¹

With the unimpeded rise of Christian triumphalism, this sonnet turn prayer is more urgent than ever. Triumphalism is an over confident brand of religious enthusiasm that is disguised as faith and concern for God and His glory. In reality, this façade is success-oriented and is preoccupied with the believer’s personal victory. Inherently, it is an assumption of victory based on zeal and personal vision rather than on a Biblical calculation of God’s ultimate purpose and intention.

The last person we ever come to confront is ourselves. “There is a coward sparing in the heart” – that’s the reason. We’ll do anything to avoid locating this coward and calling it out by name. It lurks and maneuver in all the possible terrains of life. In all likelihood, we have not in the days of grace plunged deep enough to know that we’re “offspring of penury and low-born fear,” and that “prayer must take heed nor overdo its part.” Triumphalism is the overdoing of a self-centered heart bent on achieving all I can in the name of God. In such a mode and pattern, we are set on a course of a self-assured mantra of “God will give and God will bless.” Due to this, we’re ever further away from realizing that “sinners must wait, not seek the very best, cry out for peace, and be of middling cheer.”

In the wise Providential ordering of the Father, “blows and beatings” permissively come visiting our souls, seeking and searching out the “false heart” that “cheatest God” in ways we have purportedly convinced ourselves to be God’s ways. A man cannot sustain a life having cheated God and not come to a form of self-abuse and eventually conceit – “dost thy life molest”.

His “blows” and His “beatings” are the safest. They have only one end in view: “to make clean the innermost part”.

¹ MacDonald, George. Diary of an Old Soul. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994. Print.

When He came into the house, His disciples began questioning Him privately, “Why could we not drive it out?” And He said to them, “This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer” (Mark 9:28-29. NASB).


This statement by Jesus, “This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer” augurs a dramatic understanding of prayer unknown by any of his disciples. Jesus’ understanding and practice of prayer stemmed from His intimate, unbroken relationship with His Father. For Him, this was the foundation of prayer. That intimation between Jesus and the Father was carried in Jesus’ incarnational life. This life bore the fruit of prayer which carried the authority that commanded the unclean spirit to depart from the boy (v. 25).

The measure of Jesus’ prayer was in tandem with the depth of His relationship with the Father. The latter is the cause of the earlier. No prayers of ours as men and women are to be greater than the lives we live. Our prayers are as deep, high, mature, and effective as our lives are. When the external performances of prayer are greater than our internal relationship with the Lord, pseudo-spirituality soon becomes the order of the day. Nowhere is this display more apparent than in the Pharisees of Jesus’ days.

The fortuitous question of the disciples deriving from the crisis, “Why could we not drive it out?” must pass from a sense of shame to a definite severance of all lingering human presumptuousness and self-confidence.

Embedded in our relationship with the Lord is the discipline He brings to us that from time to time edges us to a place of “why could we not drive it out?” The purpose being that we would abandon and be brought to utter helplessness. A dying is required if our prayer is to change. Our helplessness changes our view of God. More often than not, most of our views of God have gone awry until they are confronted. In relational reality, our hearts are reconstituted and realigned. Like a child, we begin to feel His heart, perceive His mind, and pray His prayer.

In the most profound economy of God, His choice of the priesthood whereby man, in all his days, would serve Him is indeed life’s highest calling and mystery. The priestly garment initially designed in heaven-mindedness was seen by God Himself as a prophetic act of salvation that He would clothe man with. In His wisdom, the intention was that the salvation that comes upon man will re-image him in the likeness of Jesus Christ and that that image will serve the Father.

It is what looks like God that serves God – this was the intrinsic foundation of the priesthood. God’s pleasure was in what reflects His heart and nature. The tragic departure of this reality was to set Israel’s course down the path of religious idolatries. The same path that perhaps multitudes in our time are unconsciously treading on. Convincingly in a utilitarian (a man’s usability) mentality, much of Christian enterprises powers on with the emphasis on a man’s self-will, ambition, determination, availability, and self-interest. The indomitable slogan is, “what I do serves God.” If what I do serves God, I have then no need to be clothe with His salvation. I can then serve God in any way imaginable, except being priestly. Priestly service returns to God what first came from God. Priests could only serve with what belongs to God. No one single part of the entire Priesthood was ever devised, formed, planned, and initiated by or through man; what comes from God returns to God.

God is served when His work of salvation in a man finds fulfilment. The salvation that is worked out in all the nooks and crannies of our lives turns into a sweet aroma, a satisfying fragrance that ascends as priestly offering in His Presence. What salvation becomes in the deepest part of a man is what serves and pleases the Father as the highest: “…in bringing many sons to glory” (Heb. 2:10 NASB).

Any wonder that our Elder Brother, the Lord Jesus Himself declared this: “The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind, You are a priest forever…” (Ps. 110:4 NASB). As Jesus is in the Father’s Presence as High Priest, so are those who are partakers of His Divine nature—bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh. They are priestly like Him in every way.